Get More Leads with Evergreen Content

Does evergreen content play a prominent role in your content strategy? If not, you may be missing out on an easy way to attract leads. Evergreen content is a type of educational or reference content that people will save and share, which makes it a valuable marketing tool.

An “evergreen” topic is a term borrowed from magazine journalism, which refers to topics that are always of interest to readers. In the context of content marketing it has basically the same meaning – topics that are always relevant to your audience, as opposed to topics about current trends.

Evergreen content is useful and informative, which accounts for its wide appeal. For example, this article on Entreprenuer.com, 7 Challenges Successful People Overcome, would appeal to any person who desires success.

Although evergreen topics may be of a “timeless” nature, that doesn’t mean evergreen content never gets outdated. It’s the topic that’s evergreen, the actual content may contain details that needs to be updated periodically. All content needs to be refreshed or replaced periodically, but evergreen content is more likely to just need a light refresh to remain relevant.

Evergreen content works well in a variety of formats. Here’s a short list of popular types of evergreen content:

Guides that contain useful reference or how-to information are a prime type of evergreen content. A guide can be in the form of an article, a blog post, an ebook, or a white paper. When a title begins with “The Definitive Guide…” or “The Top Ten Best Practices…” you can be pretty sure that it’s evergreen content. Because of their high value to a large audience, evergreen guides are often used as premium content for opt-in offers, such as Econsultancy’s 100+ Practical Content Marketing Tips.

Infographics that are essentially a guide on a popular topic are evergreen content. For example, this post on MarketingProfs, A Sensible Social Media Checklist for Business [Infographic], covers nine major social media channels and tips for how to use them. This checklist is very useful for beginning and even more advanced marketers. If any of these channels become obsolete, the infographic will have to be updated. But it’s very likely that these social media channels will be around for a few years at least.

Videos that explain and demonstrate how to solve a common problem can be evergreen, as we know from the popularity of video tutorials on YouTube. For the purpose of marketing, these videos should be as evergreen as possible since video can’t be updated.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about your products and services can be good topics for evergreen FAQs – for example, how to find, how to buy, or how to repair or upgrade products.

While many of the benefits of evergreen content and content marketing are the same, there are some unique advantages of evergreen content. Evergreen content is especially good for the following:

Repurposing – Since marketing requires a constant stream of content, repurposing becomes a necessity to keep the content pipeline full. It’s easier to repurpose evergreen content into other content such as blog posts and infographics.

Increasing shares – According to business.com, evergreen content drives social sharing because people tend to share helpful resources that other people would find useful.

Driving steady traffic to your website – Related to social sharing is the potential for evergreen content to drive traffic to your website, especially if the content contains popular keywords that trend well over time.

Given the advantages of evergreen content, it’s definitely a worthwhile endeavor to create these assets. Having great, engaging content is good, but great, engaging content that stays relevant for a long time is a better return on investment.